The Digested Twenty-first Century

Also by John Crace

Vertigo: One Football Fan’s Fear of Success

Brideshead Abbreviated:
The Digested Read of the Twentieth Century

Baby Alarm: Thoughts from a Neurotic Father

Harry’s Games: Inside the Mind of Harry Redknapp

John Crace

CONSTABLE
·
LONDON

Constable & Robinson Ltd

55–56 Russell Square

London WC1B 4HP

www.constablerobinson.com

First published in the UK by Constable
an imprint of Constable & Robinson, 2014

Copyright © John Crace 2014

All Digested Reads first published by the
Guardian
(
theguardian.com
)
© Guardian News & Media Ltd. and John Crace

The right of John Crace to be identified as the author of this work
has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright,
Designs & Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-78033-858-3 (hardback)
ISBN: 978-1-78033-908-5 (ebook)

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Printed and bound in the EU

Cover by Simon Levy and Nicola Jennings

For John Sutherland, superprof

Introduction

Serious Fiction

The Laying on of Hands
– Alan Bennett

Life of Pi
– Yann Martel

The Little Friend
– Donna Tartt

Cosmopolis
– Don DeLillo

Notes on a Scandal
– Zoë Heller

Crossing the Lines
– Melvyn Bragg

Never Let Me Go
– Kazuo Ishiguro

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
– Jonathan Safran Foer

Memories of My Melancholy Whores
– Gabriel García Márquez

The Possibility of an Island
– Michel Houellebecq

No Country for Old Men
– Cormac McCarthy

Everyman
– Philip Roth

Travels in the Scriptorium
– Paul Auster

The Cleft
– Doris Lessing

On Chesil Beach
– Ian McEwan

Engleby
– Sebastian Faulks

Michael Tolliver Lives
– Armistead Maupin

Bright Shiny Morning
– James Frey

The Little Stranger
– Sarah Waters

The Original of Laura: A Novel in Fragments
– Vladimir Nabokov

Solar
– Ian McEwan

So Much For That
– Lionel Shriver

Imperial Bedrooms
– Bret Easton Ellis

Freedom
– Jonathan Franzen

The Stranger’s Child
– Alan Hollinghurst

The Sense of an Ending
– Julian Barnes

The Marriage Plot
– Jeffrey Eugenides

Bring Up the Bodies
– Hilary Mantel

Lionel Asbo
– Martin Amis

Umbrella
– Will Self

NW
– Zadie Smith

Back to Blood
– Tom Wolfe

A Hologram for the King
– Dave Eggers

The Childhood of Jesus
– JM Coetzee

Chick Lit

The Clematis Tree
– Ann Widdecombe

I Don’t Know How She Does It
– Allison Pearson

Liz Jones’s Diary
– Liz Jones

Wicked!
– Jilly Cooper

Notting Hell
– Rachel Johnson

Handle with Care
– Jodi Picoult

Fifty Shades of Grey
– EL James

Peaches for Monsieur Le Curé
– Joanne Harris

In the Name of Love
– Katie Price

It
– Alexa Chung

Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy
– Helen Fielding

Lad Lit

A Long Way Down
– Nick Hornby

My Favourite Wife
– Tony Parsons

Meltdown
– Ben Elton

Round the Bend
– Jeremy Clarkson

Autobiography/Memoir

Experience
– Martin Amis

Things My Mother Never Told Me
– Blake Morrison

A Round-Heeled Woman
– Jane Juska

Broken Music
– Sting

Chronicles, Volume 1
– Bob Dylan

The Intimate Adventures of a London Call-Girl
– Belle de Jour

Don’t You Know Who I Am?
– Piers Morgan

Snowdon
– Anne de Courcy

Going Rogue: An American Life
– Sarah Palin

Must You Go?
– Antonia Fraser

A Journey
– Tony Blair

Life: Keith Richards

Bird House
– Annie Proulx

Mud, Sweat and Tears
– Bear Grylls

A Walk-On Part
– Chris Mullin

May I Have Your Attention, Please?
– James Corden

Vagina
– Naomi Wolf

Margaret Thatcher: The Authorised Biography, Volume 1
– Charles Moore

A Man in Love
– Karl Ove Knausgård

Girl Least Likely To
– Liz Jones

An Appetite for Wonder
– Richard Dawkins

Letters/Diaries

The Letters of Kingsley Amis

The Diaries of Kenneth Tynan

Alan Clark: The Last Diaries

Primo Time
– Anthony Sher

The Letters of Noël Coward

Ever, Dirk: The Bogarde Letters

The Pursuit of Laughter: Essays, Articles, Reviews & Diary
– Diana Mosley

God Bless America
– Piers Morgan

Letters to Monica
– Philip Larkin

PG Wodehouse: A Life in Letters

Public Enemies
–
Michel Houellebecq and Bernard Henri-Levy

Liberation, Volume 3: Diaries: 1970-1983
–
Christopher Isherwood

Counting One’s Blessings: The Selected Letters of Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother

The Letters of TS Eliot Volume 4:1928–1929

Distant Intimacy
– Frederic Raphael and Joseph Epstein

Here and Now: Letters 2008–2011
–
Paul Auster and JM Coetzee

Buildings: Letters 1960–1975
– Isaiah Berlin

Self-Help

The Privilege of Youth
– Dave Pelzer

Freakonomics
– Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner

The Game
– Neil Strauss

The Architecture of Happiness
– Alain de Botton

Small Dogs Can Save Your Life
– Bel Mooney

I Can Make You Happy
– Paul McKenna

Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother
– Amy Chua

How to be a Woman
– Caitlin Moran

French Children Don’t Throw Food
– Pamela Druckerman

Celebrate
– Pippa Middleton

Antifragile
– Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Manuscript Found in Accra
– Paulo Coelho

David and Goliath
– Malcolm Gladwell

Science/History/Religion

Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World
–
Niall Ferguson

A Briefer History of Time
– Stephen Hawking

God is Not Great
– Christopher Hitchens

The Case for God
– Karen Armstrong

Religion for Atheists
– Alain de Botton

Wonders of Life
– Brian Cox

Thrillers

Liberation Day
– Andy McNab

Resurrection Men
– Ian Rankin

Avenger
– Frederick Forsyth

The Da Vinci Code
– Dan Brown

State of Fear
– Michael Crichton

Hannibal Rising
– Thomas Harris

Beneath the Bleeding
– Val McDermid

The Troubled Man
– Henning Mankell

Carte Blanche
– Jeffery Deaver

Phantom
– Jo Nesbø

A Delicate Truth
– John le Carré

The Cuckoo’s Calling
– Robert Galbraith

Cooking and Gardening

A Cook’s Tour
– Anthony Bourdain

Gordon Ramsay Makes it Easy
– Gordon Ramsay

Jamie’s Italy
– Jamie Oliver

Breakfast at the Wolseley
– AA Gill

Nigella’s Christmas
– Nigella Lawson

Noma: Time and Place in Nordic Cuisine
– René Redzepi

Notes From My Kitchen Table
– Gwyneth Paltrow

Gardening at Longmeadow
– Monty Don

Bread
– Paul Hollywood

Travel

Down Under
– Bill Bryson

Stephen Fry in America
– Stephen Fry

The Last Supper
– Rachel Cusk

Phenomenon

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
– JK Rowling

Acknowledgements

Index

Between the start of the twentieth century and the beginning of the First World War, L Frank Baum wrote
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
, Colette wrote
Claudine in Paris
, Joseph Conrad wrote
Heart of Darkness
, Baronness Orczy wrote
The Scarlet Pimpernel
, EM Forster wrote
Howards End
, Thomas Mann wrote
Death in Venice
and Marcel Proust wrote
Swann’s Way
. All these books have entered the literary canon and are still read today.

The Digested Read started life in early 2000 and has been running continuously in the
Guardian
ever since. Its premise is quite simple: to take the book that has been receiving the most media attention in any given week and rewrite it in about 700 words, retelling the story in the style of the author. However the emphasis is often on those aspects of the book that the author might prefer to have gone unnoticed: the clunky plot devices, fairytale psychology, poor dialogue, stylistic tics, unedited longueurs and the emperor’s new clothes.

Is the Digested Read parody, pastiche or satire? The distinctions frequently are blurred. It can be all three, depending on the book in question; but it is always meant to be entertaining, funny and informative. Literary reviewing has become more critically objective since I began writing the Digested Read, thanks mainly to the growth of literary blogs and below-the-line conversations on newspaper websites. But it is still relatively cosy compared to theatre, film and music reviewing.

The literary world is quite small: many reviewers are also authors. That can blur the critical boundaries; sometimes towards a hatchet job as old enemies settle scores, but mostly towards reviews that are rather more anodyne and favourable than they might otherwise have been. Who wants to make too many waves, when it might be your book being reviewed next? Some writers also seem to be given an inexplicably easier ride than others; almost as if the literary world has collectively decided that some authors are beyond adverse criticism.